Weeknotes 29 June -3 July
How might we help advisers feel confident they have the right answer?
This post is continuing a collection of weeknotes written by my teammates Leanne Griffin and Rhona Buttress, all about an experiment we’ve been running with a group of 4 local Citizens Advice who are our partners in the incubator network.
This week’s story in short:
- We’ve reached a positive outcome this week, making headway on what we want to test and focusing on risky assumptions rather than over committing to individual ideas
- But it has been hard work for everyone involved
- There’s also some interesting product management-y stuff at the end
Testing…what?
This week has been focused on solving a conundrum: we know what assumptions we want to test, but we don’t know what we want to test.
Let’s step back a moment.
As of last week we had three ideas that we thought could be valuable:
- A peer to peer support network could take the pressure off Session supervisors by enabling advisers to go elsewhere for support. Advisers could also gain reassurance in this space therefore improving individuals confidence.
- Advisers, supervisors, and team leaders could annotate advice content. The annotations would be used by advisers when reading advice content.
- Put exploratory questions for advisers to use alongside advice content so advisers feel more confident they have asked the right questions
We had mapped out some risky assumptions for each of these.
We decided to start by testing the riskiest assumptions for the ‘put exploratory questions alongside advice content’ idea.
The crux of what we want to learn — the riskiest assumption — is whether using these exploratory questions in an advice session actually leads to advisers feeling confident that they’ve covered the bases with a client.
If not, then all the specifics about format and feasibility are just not relevant.
A twist in the story
Part way through the week we discovered that a colleague in another team has arrived at a similar idea through looking at a related problem.
They’re producing the exploratory questions in a different format to the one we had in mind. We’d been thinking about having prompts on an advice content web page, whereas their approach is more to get the current list of questions into a digital format like a slide deck or a google doc.
As we’re testing our riskiest assumption — does using the questions improve adviser confidence that they’ve covered the bases — rather than a specific idea format, we can still learn what we need to while also sharing our design and testing expertise with another team by working with them.
So, that’s good news! And certainly a win for the ‘test assumptions not ideas’ approach.
Nonetheless, this week has felt quite challenging.
It takes a while to process new information, and changing direction causes uncertainty.
My reflection on this week is that we’ve reached a positive outcome while picking up some bruises and scratches on the way.
I’m finding it hard to articulate exactly what these bruises and scratches are at 5pm on a Friday, but what I’ve found hard personally is trying to make good decisions while balancing pace and making sure that everyone’s thoughts are heard.
Maybe this is even harder when you’re working remotely, but I’m not even sure about that!
Speaking of reflection, the image for this post is from a show and tell slide deck put together by Leanne Griffin. The show and tell was focused on this experiment, but I liked this image because it uses 18 words to show the most essential changes we’ve made to our model in the last 18 months:
What it doesn’t show is how and why, but if you’re interested in that maybe leave a comment and we’ll post more about it in the future!
Product stuff
I’m a product owner at Citizens Advice but recently I’ve stepped up my interest and involvement in product as a discipline.
Last week I ran a little 30 min intro to product management using this activity centered around Teresa Torres’ opportunity-solution tree. If you haven’t come across Teresa but you’re interested in how you can align product strategy with ideas, or how to put customer problems at the heart of prioritisation, then I recommend starting by reading this article and then hoovering up everything else she has written!
This week I got to run a great session just with the Product Community of Practice here at Citizens Advice. We talked about our experiences of remote working.
Please feel free to add to this or use it for yourself :)
